When considering your business’ target audience, location can be a major factor. Cultural nuances and norms can differ subtly or greatly from one region to another, and content that doesn’t fit the audience’s expectations will have a very difficult time garnering trust and engagement. On an international level, these differences are magnified significantly. Geo-based redirects allow you to create multiple versions of the same page that are individually tailored to users in their current location, and automatically send visitors to the most relevant content.
Using location-based redirects, you can deliver a better user experience to a much larger and more diverse crowd. Particularly, users who speak other languages can benefit from being redirected automatically to a translated version of the page without having to try to navigate the site (not to mention that this allows you to provide custom-translated versions of your content, which will be more readable and compelling than what an in-browser translation tool like Google Translate could provide). Product availability, contact info, and shipping policies that are specific to that region can also be displayed only where they apply.
All in all, geolocation is intended to optimize conversion rates for more users. That being said, there are some technical SEO risks associated with this practice, if not implemented correctly.
It is well known that Google does not take kindly to deception, especially when it’s the one being deceived. “Cloaking” is a term used to describe when a site shows different content to Googlebot than what is being shown to actual users. If you’re not intentionally showing different content to Google (i.e. creating a version of your site and redirecting Googlebot’s IP address to it), then you probably won’t get penalized for cloaking.
Country-coded top-level-domains have historically been the top choice for international websites. Each ccTLD functions as its own site that is targeted to a specific language and region. While this method offers more flexibility in terms of diversifying content across different domains, it requires purchasing and managing many individual domains, which can be a cumbersome task. Additionally, Google will view these domains as completely separate sites, so link equity is not shared between them.
Country-coded top-level-domains have historically been the top choice for international websites.
